The Essential Ellen Willis

545 Pages·2014·5.162 MB·English

by  Aronowitz, Nona Willis, Willis, Ellen

THE ESSENTIAL ELLEN WILLIS
Other Books by Ellen Willis
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll
No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays
Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
The Essential
Ellen Willis
ELLEN WILLIS
Nona Willis Aronowitz, Editor
With Contributions from Spencer Ackerman,
Stanley Aronowitz, Irin Carmon, Ann Friedman,
Cord Jefferson, and Sara Marcus
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis | London
This book is published with assistance from the Margaret S. Harding Memorial
Endowment honoring the first director of the University of Minnesota Press.
Copyright 2014 by Nona Willis Aronowitz
Part introductions copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Willis, Ellen, author.
The Essential Ellen Willis / Ellen Willis; Nona Willis Aronowitz, editor; with contri-
butions from Spencer Ackerman, Stanley Aronowitz, Irin Carmon, Ann Friedman, Cord
Jefferson, and Sara Marcus.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8166-8120-4 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-8121-1 (pb)
1. American essays. I. Aronowitz, Nona Willis, 1984– editor of compilation. II. Title.
AC8.W665 2014
081—dc23
2014001752
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xi INTRODUCTION: TRANSCENDENCE NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ
The Sixties Up from Radicalism
3 INTRODUCTION SARA MARCUS
5 Up from Radicalism: A Feminist Journal (US Magazine, 1969)
20 Dylan (Cheetah, 1967)
36 The Cultural Revolution Saved from Drowning(The New Yorker,September 1969)
40 Women and the Myth of Consumerism (Ramparts, 1970)
43 Talk of the Town: Hearing (The New Yorker, February 1969)
The Seventies Exile on Main Street
49 INTRODUCTION IRIN CARMON
51 Beginning to See the Light (Village Voice, 1977)
59 Janis Joplin (The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ’n’ Roll, 1980)
64 Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life (Village Voice, May 1979)
67 Memoirs of a Non–Prom Queen (Rolling Stone,August 1976)
70 The Trial of Arline Hunt (Rolling Stone,1975)
89 Abortion: Is a Woman a Person? (Village Voice, March and April 1979)
94 Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography (Village Voice, October and November 1979)
101 The Family: Love It or Leave It (Village Voice,September 1979)
115 Tom Wolfe’s Failed Optimism (Village Voice, 1977)
121 The Velvet Underground(Stranded by Greil Marcus, 1979)
132 Next Year in Jerusalem(Rolling Stone,April 1977)
The Eighties Coming Down Again
173 INTRODUCTION ANN FRIEDMAN
175 Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution(Social Text, Fall 1982)
200 Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex? (Village Voice, June 1981)
209 The Last Unmarried Person in America (Village Voice, July 1981)
213 Teenage Sex: A Modesty Proposal (Village Voice, October 1986)
216 Sisters under the Skin? Confronting Race and Sex
(Village Voice Literary Supplement, June 1982)
229 Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism (Social Text,Summer 1984)
256 Escape from New York (Village Voice, July 1981)
276 Coming Down Again: After the Age of Excess (Village Voice, January 1989)
288 The Drug War: From Vision to Vice (Village Voice,April 1986)
292 The Drug War: Hell No, I Won’t Go(Village Voice,September 1989)
297 The Diaper Manifesto: We Need a Child-Rearing Movement
(Village Voice, July 1986)
305 To Emma, with Love(Village Voice,December 1989)
The Nineties Decade of Denial
309 INTRODUCTION CORD JEFFERSON
311 Selections from “Decade of Denial” (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)
323 Ending Poor People As We Know Them (Village Voice,December 1994)
327 What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about The Bell Curve
(Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)
334 Rodney King’s Revenge(Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)
339 Million Man Mirage(Village Voice,November 1995)
343 Monica and Barbara and Primal Concerns (New York Times, March 1999)
346 Villains and Victims (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)
358 ’Tis Pity He’s a Whore(Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)
366 Is Motherhood Moonlighting? (Newsday, March 1991)
368 Say It Loud: Out of Wedlock and Proud (Newsday, February 1994)
370 Bring in the Noise(The Nation,April 1996)
375 Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)
The Aughts Our Politics, Ourselves
391 INTRODUCTION SPENCER ACKERMAN
393 Why I’m Not for Peace(Radical Society,April 2002)
401 Confronting the Contradictions (Dissent,Summer 2003)
405 The Mass Psychology of Terrorism (Implicating Empire,
edited by Stanley Aronowitz et al., 2003)
416 Dreaming of War (The Nation,September 2001)
420 Freedom from Religion (The Nation, February 2001)
429 Our Mobsters, Ourselves (The Nation, March 2001)
437 Is There Still a Jewish Question? Why I’m an Anti-Anti-Zionist
(Wrestling with Zion, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, 2003)
444 Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope (Dissent, Fall 2005)
450 Escape from Freedom: What’s the Matter with Tom Frank
(and the Lefties Who Love Him)?(Situations, 2006)
464 Three Elegies for Susan Sontag(New Politics,Summer 2005)
Coda Selections from “The Cultural Unconscious in American Politics:
Why We Need a Freudian Left”
473 INTRODUCTION STANLEY ARONOWITZ
477 The Cultural Unconscious in American Politics: Why We Need
a Freudian Left
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ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Doing the research for Out of the Vinyl Deeps was mostly a solitary project
(not counting a crucial assist from Georgia Christgau), but putting together
The Essential Ellen Willis was a far more crowd-sourced process. Thank you
to Robert Christgau, Richard Goldstein, Donna Gaines, Ann Snitow, Alice
Echols, Devon Powers, Rosalyn Baxandall, Alix Shulman, and Rick Perlstein
for your suggestions of what to include. Thanks to the archivists at the Radcliffe
Institute for organizing Mom’s work in such an intuitive way, and thanks to
Laura Sikes Jambon for the “artifacts” photographs.
I was incredibly lucky to include the voices of Ann Friedman, Cord Jefferson,
Spencer Ackerman, Irin Carmon, Sara Marcus (whose realtalk partly inspired
this collection), and my dad, Stanley Aronowitz, whose essays render this collec-
tion much more vivid and relevant. I’m grateful to Doug Armato at the University
of Minnesota Press for “getting” this project and for his merciful edit when we
needed to cut fifty thousand words. Thanks also to Danielle Kasprzak, who was
ever patient when the project dragged on longer than intended. And thank you,
Meredith Kaffel, for handling business so I didn’t have to.